Your Right to Know

The leader of the public agency that owns Nationwide Arena said his board is dedicated to
transparency for the private group that will operate the facility.

But Bill Jennison, the director of the Franklin County Convention Facilities Authority, stopped
short of saying that the operating group, which also includes representatives of Ohio State
University, Nationwide and the Columbus Blue Jackets, would commit to open meetings.

That group, Columbus Arena Management, or CAM, has yet to hold its initial organizational
meeting, where the nature of its future meetings can be discussed, Jennison said. “All these
details will get worked out,” he said yesterday.

Representatives of Mayor Michael B. Coleman’s office, as well as other city and county
officials, called Jennison to City Hall last week after news reports that management of the arena
had been handed off to a private entity. That raised questions about whether CAM, a private group
formed on the day that the purchase of the arena was approved, will hold open meetings.

City Attorney Richard C. Pfeiffer Jr. said yesterday that the meeting was a chance for officials
to reiterate that they would like to see CAM operate as a public body even if it is not legally
required to do so.

“The question is ‘Why don’t you open the meetings up? Are you hiding something?’ ” Pfeiffer
said. “If the answer is no, why are you doing it?”

Pfeiffer said state open-meetings laws would allow the body to close the meetings to discuss
things such as negotiating to bring acts to the arena, thus protecting it from being at a
disadvantage to private venues.

Dan Williamson, Coleman’s spokesman, said he, Pfeiffer and the mayor’s chief of staff, Michael
Reese, met with Jennison and were joined by City Auditor Hugh Dorrian, Franklin County
Administrator Don Brown and county Prosecutor Ron O’Brien.

Williamson said the meeting allowed him to make it clear that Coleman expects the agency to
conduct its business in the public eye.

“On our end, Mike and I communicated the mayor’s position on this issue,” he said. “The mayor
strongly believes, whether it’s meetings or documents, that this CAM should be bound by the same
regulations” as the convention facilities authority.

He said it shouldn’t be a matter of whether the private board, which is made up of Blue Jackets
President Mike Priest, Jennison and one representative each from Nationwide Insurance and Ohio
State University, can meet in private, but whether it should.

“Let’s not worry about the law. Let’s just voluntarily do it,” Williamson said.

No matter what happens, Jennison said, all the decisions on improvements and upkeep of the
arena, such as a planned $5.5 million for a high-definition scoreboard, will be handled through the
facilities authority, and thus be approved and documented in open meetings.